Racine Art Museum aims high

Just as grand cathedrals served as magnets for religious pilgrims during the Middle Ages, many museums in the late 20th Century were conceived as gathering places for cultural pilgrims.

The Racine Art Museum, opening May 11, aspires to achieve this "Bilbao effect," similar to the impact the celebrated Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim has had on the Basque capital. Such attention would spotlight the museum's unique collection and programming, and improve the flagging fortunes of its once-thriving home city.

RAM's campaign to create a cultural presence is particularly compelling when you consider its mission, its quirky history and the increasingly significant role of one of its major benefactors. What's more, the design of its new building marks a notable achievement from one of Chicago's most talented, yet under-recognized architecture firms.

RAM isn't exactly a new institution, tracing its history through the Charles A. Wustum Museum, established in 1941. Wustum was not a collector -- he was a farmer who thought Racine should have an art museum -- and when it opened, the museum had no collection. In its first few years, it operated more as an art center, where the public could take art classes and see exhibitions of work by local and regional artists. But its first director, Sylvester Gerry, was prescient enough in 1943 to buy some choice Depression-era works on paper and block-printed textiles, which at that time were being de-accessioned by the Work Projects Administration.

At a crossroads

By the early 1980s, according to RAM director Bruce Pepich, the museum was at a crossroads. With major art museums located roughly 40 miles to the north (Milwaukee) and south (Chicago), it was faced with having to define its role within the region.

"We couldn't afford to insure a Van Gogh, no less buy one," said Pepich, who came to the museum directly after graduating from Northern Illinois University in 1973 and has been its director since 1981. He noted that people in Racine always responded well to handcrafted objects when the museum showed them. "They might not have liked abstract expressionism, but if there was someone in the family who crocheted or knitted or painted china or even fabricated tool and die, they'd never look at crafts and say, `Oh, my child could do that.'"

The emphasis on craft was validated in 1991, when Pepich received a call from Karen Johnson Boyd, a member of the family who owned Racine-based SC Johnson. A board member and major benefactor of the museum as well as one of the nation's foremost collectors of American craft, she asked Pepich if he could send over the museum van to pick up "a few things" she wanted to donate.

After 12 trips between her house and the museum, Pepich says, "I was practically in tears, opening box after box of incredible examples of American craft." The gift included more than 200 pieces from Boyd's collection of baskets, ceramics, glass and jewelry, which Pepich says brought the museum national attention.

By the late 1990s, it became clear that the old Wustum campus couldn't accommodate the museum's ambitions, and its board decided that, rather than build a new building on its existing site, the exhibition space would relocate to downtown Racine, while the educational programming stayed at the old campus.

Boyd's generosity to the museum will be well recognized at the new building: Under "Racine Art Museum" on the facade are the words "Karen Johnson Boyd Galleries."

Carrying on a family tradition

Karen Johnson Boyd's appreciation for art and craft comes rather naturally. Under the leadership of her father, Herbert F. Johnson, Jr., who ran the family-owned company from 1928 until 1965, SC Johnson made an impressive series of artistic and cultural contributions. The SC Johnson Foundation continues in that tradition today, having contributed nearly $3 million toward RAM's $6 million budget (the property along Main Street in Racine, valued at $700,000, was donated by M&I Bank). With other family and corporate gifts, the Johnsons have been the most active participants in the museum's overall $10 million capital campaign.

The Johnsons have had a well-documented affinity for the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. The architect designed the company's innovative Racine headquarters in 1935-36; Boyd reports that, at the time, although she was only a teenager, her father respected her enough to seek out her opinions. One day, she says, "we were driving, and he asked me if I knew who the most important architect in the world was. When I said Frank Lloyd Wright's name and said that he came from right here in Wisconsin, he practically went off the road," because he had just contacted Wright for the initial interviews on the project.